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Friday, October 28, 2011

A
well known Israeli writer is selling his new book exclusively through
an Israeli supermarket chain. There, nestled between the carrots and
tomatoes, you can pick up his book and add it to your cart of groceries.
How is he doing so far? He has already sold over 50,000 copies of his
book - which is quite good in such a small country as Israel. Why did
he choose to sell his new book only in this one supermarket chain? He
apparently read the writing on the wall. More and more bookstores are
closing. Those which are still open have entered into a price war, and
as a result - books are marked down by more than 70% and it is
impossible for an author to make any real money from his writing. Is his
decision then a protest, or is he simply giving in to the inevitable?We
live in an age where e-books are becoming more and more popular, and
many people fear that they will replace the hardcover book altogether.
Will only online bookstores survive and the library shelves now be
filled with e-readers? And if there still is such a thing as the
hardcover - will this be nestled somewhere in the supermarket? Attention shoppers. There is a special sale of fresh books in aisle 5.
And what about the author? Will he be sitting in the dairy section
signing books? Maybe they will leave it up to each author to decide
where in the supermarket he wants to set up his table. For some, the
pastry and desserts section would serve quite well. Others may prefer
coffee and tea. And others may resign themselves to the vegetables. Will
your place in the supermarket define you?Or
does it really matter? Surely the idea is the essence, and how it is
housed is of secondary importance. Once upon a time, such things were
literally written in stone. A rather tedious and slow operation. And
then ink was invented and each book was painstakingly written out by
hand. And if you wanted a copy of the book, that too had to be written
out by hand. And then along came the printing press. There must have
been a lot of opposition to that. Mass producing ideas through
automation. How could anything good come out of automation? But, like
most things, it didn’t take long for us to forget what came before and
we soon began romanticizing the notion of the mass produced book. Or
maybe the romanticizing only came when the book appeared to be in danger
of extinction. Think of it - we are not even left with something we can
hold in our hands! How crass. Well, actually you can hold a kindle in
your hands, but what about the smell of leather and the rustling of the
pages. (When was the last time we actually held a leather book in our
hands - or anything with a hardcover?)And
then some people - those real fanatics - ask why we even need books.
Why not let ideas play out through film. Much more visual and so much
more can be included. Imagination? People want to be entertained,
without exerting too much effort on their own part. The demands of
imagination is maybe why fewer and fewer people read books these days -
even before the first e-book or supermarket haven.It
is quite a mess, actually. At times I ask myself why I couldn’t have
published my novel twenty years ago when the rules were much clearer.
But then, maybe it is better this way. I actually wrote and published an
e-book before reading one. Is there any real irony in this? Would I
consider selling my book in a supermarket? But then, how could an e-book
be sold in a supermarket? Maybe the back of cereal box could be
transformed into an ink based e-reader screen. Different brands offering
different books. This isn’t such a revolutionary idea. It wasn’t long
ago that you got a free video cassette of a movie together with your six
pack of beer. I mean - what do we want as a writer? To reach the widest
and largest number of readers possible - no? I see some of you shaking
your heads. I
have actually begun to write a screenplay for my book. Not so much
because I want to quickly reach a wider audience, but rather because I
realized that Gwyneth Paltrow will soon be too old to play the main
female part (she was quite young when I first started writing the book).
But I digress.One
day, probably not in the too distant future, young people will remark -
upon hearing about bookstores - “What a quaint idea. A whole store just
for selling books. But how could anyone make a living just out of
selling books?”Or by writing them.

Friday, October 21, 2011

The
characters worked their way in and out of the darkness. The only thing
that seemed to give them life was the solitary light coming from the
computer screen. Michael was all alone in the room. The only visitor was
his muse. Yet he never knew when, or if, she’d appear again.He
looked again at the words on the screen. When was it that he had become
the executioner? His virtual finger hovered over the send button. It
would take only one click to become creator. Creating man out of his own
likeness. He looked nervously around the room, wondering if he was
being watched. How was this any different from the characters in his
novel - from the imaginary world he had created for them?Yet
his characters had never tried to enter into his own world. They had
attempted, perhaps, to escape the confines of his fiction through
creating fiction of their own, having tasted from the tree of knowledge.
But they had never sought to replace him.And
here he was, watching helplessly as he gradually lost control over his
virtual creation. He had invited Guy to inhabit his world, help him
rediscover what he thought he had lost. And instead, Guy revealed a new
world that Michael couldn’t have. But it was the same world in which
Michael was living. A world in which he and Guy could not both exist.
Was Michael to be banished for trying to replace his own creator?When
do fiction and reality no longer exist in separate worlds - and mere
mortals have the audacity to believe that they can change the laws of
creation? This is our journey of discovery in - “As I Died Laughing”."What are you mad at?" "Everyone. Everything." "What's so funny then?" "The only thing I can do now is laugh." And so it begins.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Ronald
Green, in his book Nothing Matters, makes a distinction between nothing and nothingness. Nothing, he claims, is the absence of
everything, whereas nothingness is the absence of something. An
important distinction. But how do we distinguish, then, between
something and nothingness?

How
much room is there in the human consciousness? For everything added,
must something else be erased? How much love are we capable of giving?
Can we have multiple relationships without one coming at the expense of
another? Can we spread our love evenly between our children, without one
receiving more, and the other less? When we learn things, must we
forget others? Is consciousness the something and the sub-consciousness
the nothingness? Whereas nothing appears to be absolute, nothingness is
not. We appear able to slip in and out of nothingness. But what comes first - something
or nothingness, the chicken or the egg? Can we only conceive of
nothingness after we have conceived of something and recognized its
absence?

As
an example of slipping in and out of nothingness, I’ll take you back to
an earlier blog entry - Why Guinness always tastes better in Tel Aviv. There I told you about how Ronald and I would reach great moments
of enlightenment over pints of Guinness at Molly Blooms only to have
these amazing revelations quickly evaporate into nothingness on our
separate ways home. At the time, I thought they were gone for good, but I
was mistaken. They resurfaced somehow in two separate books: Ronald’s Nothing Matters which delves deep into the concept of nothing,
offering a clear, comprehensive and in-depth study of non-fiction; and
my As I Died Laughing which sets out in a dysfunctional and fragmented
exploration into the distinction between something and nothingness,
supposedly a work of fiction.

It
seems as if we are constantly moving back and forth into nothingness
and the something which generated it. In leaving country, language and
culture behind, my new Israeli identity has erased many parts of the
Canadian identity which preceded it. The longer I have lived here in
Israel, the further back into nothingness one would expect the exile of
my Canadian self to be. But this hasn’t been the case. Recently I have
found parts of my Canadian identity, which I thought were lost, fighting
their way back into consciousness. I hear that this is not a phenomenon
unique to my own personal expatriate existence. Apparently many people find
themselves on a curve in their acclimatization to a new country and
culture. They struggle to adapt to their new country, and just when they
reach the pinnacle of feeling almost native to the new language and
culture, they enter into a period of recession - their former identity
subtly reappearing out of their nothingness. And the main difference is
that they no longer feel the need to apologize for, or try to stifle, this
something that had apparently never gone away.

Which
brings us to the concept of being. What does all this matter if we
are going to die? And then everything becomes nothing - earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to
dust - from nothing we came, and into nothing we return. But can we
refer the concept of nothing to the concept of being? If nothing is
absolute - the absence of everything - then how could anything be
created out of it? If our being was nothing before our conception in
birth, how could we have ever come about? And if nothing is the absence
of everything, how can we enter into the state of nothing after we die.
Something surely cannot become a part of nothing. This is probably
unexpectedly comforting to many - linking our being to nothingness rather than
nothing - believing that by slipping into nothingness, we can slip back
into something again. All religions seem to have built their basic
premise on this belief, although they all label it differently. For me,
personally, I have no room in my vocabulary for an omnipotent being. I
have enough of a problem trying to come to terms with my own being. Rather, at this point, it is simply a matter of logic; albeit human logic.

Understanding being, even without taking into account the state of being before our
conception and after our death, has puzzled thinkers throughout the
ages. A child cannot differentiate between itself and a separate world
at first. It goes through a cognitive development where it suddenly
becomes aware of objects separate from itself. And then later, it is also able to
differentiate between these objects. Is this something that the child is
taught, or acquires through experimentation in this new world? Or is it
a part of our cognitive programming? And if so, why does it take time for this programming to be activated? Is our cognitive programming the nothingness through which all somethings are recognized? Does this
help us understand which comes first - the chicken or the egg?

If
something came from nothingness, then the process could hypothetically
be reversed. Under special circumstances, we might find ourselves
returning to a womb like state. Let us consider the example of Gilad
Shalit, a young Israeli soldier who has been held in captivity for the
last five years by the Hamas, and who will apparently be released in a
few days. Gilad has had no real human contact in the last five years.
He has been confined to a solitary cell where his only reality is the
things inside these four walls that he can see, hear, touch and smell.
Over time, the construct of this reality must have slowly filled his
consciousness, pushing back everything he had known before then into
nothingness. And in Gilad’s case, we must ask ourselves if there is a point
of no return, where something is pushed so far back into
nothingness that it is lost forever. For Gilad has come as close as
possible to nothing - the absence of everything - as appears humanly
possible. Upon his release, will he capable of recognizing a world he
once new? Or will this once again become a learning experience? For
Gilad, his being hasn’t changed. But for his family and closest friends,
they will search for a being that they recognize,and they may have to
come to the realization that he is now a stranger. Must we then divide
being into two? Who we know ourselves to be and how others see us? After
we die, if we do still exist in nothingness or in something, the
recognition of our present being is in our eyes only. Others still
recognize our being, even after our death, but they only recognize what
they remember of us.

Life
is frail. There is no doubt about that. And it is finite - no matter
what we do. Yet we never give up on our search for meaning. Maybe we
just have to learn that meaning can come out of nothingness, just as
much as it can come out of something. Or maybe we need to take one step
further and come to the realization that there isn’t any real
difference between the two.